Mining Electronic Health Records to Develop Better Systems of Care for Children with Cerebral Palsy
Published November 2021 | Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology
Research led by Brad Kurowski, MD, MS, and colleagues highlights the complex healthcare navigation requirements for children with cerebral palsy (CP).
Investigators set out to characterize the patterns of care for children with CP in a tertiary healthcare system. They used electronic health record data from 2009 to 2019 for 6,369 children with CP.
“An overall challenge for this project was understanding the complexity of interactions that children with CP and their families had with the healthcare system,” Kurowski says. “We had to apply modeling methods uniquely to this question and use data visualization to characterize hotspots where interaction occurred.”
By using medical informatics, machine learning, and a “big data” approach, researchers uncovered clusters of care. The ratio of in-person visits to care coordination visits was calculated for each specialty. Study results include:
- The identification of seven primary clusters of care: musculoskeletal and function, neurological, high frequency/urgent care services, procedures, comorbid diagnoses, development and behavioral, and primary care.
- The in-person to care coordination visit ratio was 1:5 overall for healthcare encounters.
- Most interactions with care teams occur outside of in-person visits.
- The ratio of in-person to care coordination activities differ by specialty.
These findings provide a foundation for the development of better systems of care for these patients and to improve outcomes for children with CP and their families.
“Streamlining care, clustering services, and reducing frequent acute visits has the potential to decrease the burden of care on families and reduce healthcare costs through more efficient utilization of services,” Kurowski says.
